Slitherine

I stumbled across this by accident when doing the very first play-test for Second St Albans 1461 for my WOTR series. To cut a long story short, the Yorkists were expecting an attack from the north, but the Lancastrians swung in behind them from the west and captured St Albans. They were now directly behind the Yorkist position and the Yorkists were forced to turn round 180 degrees.

So in this screenshot you can see the Lancastrian forces moving out of St Albans to fight the Yorkists. I had started with the idea of making the third Lancastrian contingent "reinforcements", who would enter on turn 3 or 4. But I hadn't done anything to make this happen when I started the first play test as I was mainly concerned about the spacing of the Yorkist contingents along the road leading north out of St Albans. But then elements of this third Lancastrian contingent started appearing on the battlefield as "Returning" as if they were "pursuers". I had lined the contingent up off map just one rank away from the map.

So this gave me an idea. What if I put half of the third Lancastrian contingent on the map at the start and left half of it off? So these off-map units might appear in the battle or might not. This would be to simulate a certain unruliness in the Lancastrian ranks after capturing another town. They had been plundering their way down from the north prior to the battle.


The manual is quite vague about the likelihood of pursuers returning. What are the chances of getting some of these units to join the battle at some point. In a subsequent play test, the mounted units seemed quite keen to join in, the foot soldiers less so.

5% per unit per turn

Thanks Richard.